alt Hacker NewsI apprehend that you want me to say the first one is worse, but it's impossible with so few details. Like: worse for whom? in what way? to what extent?
If (for instance) my content changes often and I always want people to see an up-to-date version, the second option is clearly worse for me!
No, I've been turning it over in my mind since this question started to emerge and I think it's complicated, I don't have an answer myself. After all, the first option is really just the correlate to today's web traffic, it's just no longer your traffic. You created the value, but you do not get the user attention.
My apprehension is not with AI agents per se, it is the current, and likely future implementation: AI vendors selling the search and re-publication of other parties' content. In this relationship, neither option is great: either these providers are hammering your site on behalf of their subscribers' individual queries, or they are scraping and caching it, and reselling potentially stale information about you.